Please Look After Mom - Kyung-Sook Shin [75]
I remember the first house we lived in before we rebuilt. I really loved that house. Although now that I’ve said “love,” I don’t think it was only love. We lived forty-odd years in that house that doesn’t exist anymore. I was always in that house. Always. You were there and not there. I didn’t hear from you, as if you would never come back, but then you would return. Maybe that’s why. I can see the old house in front of me, as if it’s illuminated. I remember everything. All the things that happened in that house. The things that happened in the years when the children were born, the way I waited for you and forgot about you and hated you and waited for you again. Now the house is left behind, by itself. There’s nobody here, and only the white snow is guarding the yard.
A house is such a strange thing. Everything else gets more worn when people handle it, and sometimes you can feel a person’s poison if you get too close to him, but that’s not what happens to a house. Even a good house falls apart quickly when nobody stops by. A house is alive only when there are people living in it, brushing against it, staying in it. Look at this—one end of the roof has collapsed because of the snow. In the spring you’ll have to call the person who fixes the roof. There’s a sticker with the name and number of the roof people in the television cabinet in the living room, but I don’t know if you know about it. If you call them they’ll come and take care of it. You can’t leave the house empty like this in the winter. Even if nobody is living here, you have to come by and turn the boiler on once in a while.
Did you go to Seoul? Are you looking for me there?
This room, where I put the books Chi-hon sent down when she went to Japan, is cold, too. The books look frozen solid. After she sent the books here, this became my favorite room in the house. When I could tell that my head was going to hurt, I came in here and lay down. At first it seemed like I would get better. I didn’t want to tell you that I was in pain. Then, as soon as I opened my eyes, the pain rushed at me, and I couldn’t even cook for you, but I didn’t want you to see me as a patient. That made me lonely, many times. I would go into the room with the books and lie down. One day, holding my pounding head, I promised myself that I would read at least one book that she wrote before she came back from Japan. And I went to learn how to read, still holding my head. I couldn’t continue. When I tried to learn to read, my condition quickly got worse. I was lonely because I couldn’t tell you that I was trying to learn to read. It would have hurt my pride to say something like that. When I learned to read, I wanted to do one more thing, besides reading my daughter’s book with my own eyes: to write a farewell letter to every person in the family, before I became like this.
· · ·
The wind, it’s blowing so hard. The wind is rolling the snow in the yard and shifting it around.
Summer nights, when we set out the brazier and made steamed buns, were the best times we had in this yard. Hyong-chol would collect compost and make a fire to protect us from mosquitoes, and the younger ones would flop onto the platform and wait for the steamed buns to finish cooking in the pot on the brazier. When I made a whole pot of buns and set them out on a wicker tray, hands would shoot out, and the buns would all be gone. It took less time for the children to eat them than for me to steam them. As I put kindling in the brazier, I would look at the children lying on the platform together, waiting for another batch of buns, and it frightened me a little. How they could eat! Even though